For Palestinians in Lebanon, 69 years of despair

Sunday 21/05/2017

No shortage of suffering. A boy walks by graffiti of the Palestinian flags with Arabic text that reads: “The flag is four colours that shine on the face of the sun,” in the Bourj el-Barajneh Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon. (AP)

Sidon- Ahmad Dawoud recalled the day ten years ago when a Lebanese soldier asked to search his taxi. Then 17, the Palestinian did not wait for the soldier to find the weapons hidden in the trunk.

He jumped from the car and fled into a nearby Palestinian refugee camp, where the Lebanese Army had no authority.

It was not long afterward that Dawoud, who once admired radi­cal groups that had sprouted in the camps in Lebanon, decided he was tired of running. He surrendered to authorities and spent 14 hard months in jail.

Although he was released with­out a conviction, he could not erase the biggest strike against him: As a Palestinian in Lebanon, he is a state­less, second-class resident in the only country he has ever lived in.

Palestinians on May 15 marked 69 years since hundreds of thousands of them were forced from their homes during the 1948 war that led to the creation of Israel. Many set­tled in the neighbouring West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

As refugees, various UN charters entitle them and their descendants to the right to work and a dignified living until they can return to their homes or such settlement is reached but Palestinians in Lebanon suffer discrimination in nearly every as­pect of daily life, feeding a despera­tion that is tearing their community apart.

Many live in settlements officially recognised as refugee camps but better described as concrete ghettos ringed by checkpoints and, in some cases, blast walls and barbed wire. The United Nations runs schools and subsidises health care inside.

In Lebanon, there are 450,000 ref­ugees registered in 12 camps, where Lebanese authorities have no juris­diction.

“Our lot is less than zero,” Dawoud said recently outside Ein el-Hilweh, the crowded camp in Sidon that is one of the most volatile.

On peaceful days, children play in the damp alleys and merchants park carts of produce along the camp’s main streets.

The place, however, feels hope­lessly divided along factional and militant lines and there are frequent fights between Palestinian security forces and militants or gangs that capitalise on the general despair.

Ten people died in a flare-up in April that drove out thousands of the camp’s estimated population of 75,000.

Palestinians are prohibited from working in most professions, from medicine to transportation. Because of restrictions on ownership, what little property they have is bought under Lebanese names, leaving them vulnerable to embezzlement and expropriation.

They pay into Lebanon’s social se­curity fund but receive no benefits. Medical costs are crippling. There is little hope for remediation from the Lebanese courts.

Palestinian doctors are prohib­ited from working in the Lebanese market, so they find work only in the camps or agree to work for Lebanese clinics off the books and sign prescriptions under Lebanese doctors’ names. That leaves them open to employer abuse, a condition normally associated with low-skill work.

“If a young boy gets in trouble be­cause he is Palestinian, the prosecu­tor writes in his note to the judge, ‘He is Palestinian,’ meaning: ‘Do what you wish to him. Be cruel to him. Forget about his rights,’” said Sheikh Mohammad Muwad, a Pales­tinian imam in Sidon.

The crush of war refugees from Syria has made it even harder for Palestinians to find work. Nearly 60% of those under age 25 are un­employed, the United Nations’ Pal­estinian relief agency UNRWA said, and two-thirds of all Palestinians in Lebanon live below the poverty line.

UNRWA country director Claudio Cordone said they felt trapped in po­litical limbo and saw an “almost to­tal lack of meaningful political pros­pects of a solution” to their original displacement from Palestine.

Lebanese politicians say that as­similating Palestinians into society would undermine their right to re­turn but Palestinians said they are not asking for assimilation or na­tionality, just civil rights.

“They starve us, so that we go back to Palestine. They deprive us, so that we go back to Palestine. Well, go ahead, send us back to Palestine! Let us go to the border and we will march back into Palestine, no matter how many martyrs we must give,” Muwad said.

For those in the camps, the line between hustling and criminality is often blurred. Unemployed and feeling abandoned by the authori­ties, many turn to gangs for work.

Adding to this is a widely shared disaffection with the Palestine Lib­eration Organisation (PLO), which many Palestinians see as having sold out their rights with the failed Oslo Accords of 1994.

This has helped fuel the rise of radical Islam, a shift in the occupied Palestinian territories that is reflect­ed by Hamas’s rising popularity, and one outside the territories in the me­teoric trajectory of militant groups such as Fatah al-Islam in the volatile and deprived Nahr al-Bared camp.

Growing up in Nahr al-Bared, a camp much like Ein el-Hilweh, Da­woud said he felt a strong affiliation for Fatah al-Islam, his gateway to radical extremism.

“They were the only ones who seemed honest,” he said. “Of course, later I figured out they were just like everyone else, too.”

In 2007, the Lebanese Army razed most of Nahr al-Bared to crush Fa­tah al-Islam.

By that time, Dawoud was in Ein el-Hilweh and his arrest was the be­ginning of a slow falling out with the gangs that once sheltered him and treated him like a brother. After his stint in prison, they said they could not trust him and he was chased out of Ein el-Hilweh in 2013. Now, he can only enter the parts of the set­tlement firmly under PLO control.

With no job, no prospects and little money, Dawoud runs er­rands for others in his white 1980s-era BMW — all done under the table, of course. Palestinians cannot apply for the red licence plates that identify taxis and other commercial vehicles.

“I don’t even think about mar­rying and getting into those situa­tions,” he said, waving off starting a family at age 27. His ambition now is to apply for a visa to leave Lebanon but first he needs a travel document and for that he needs to be on good terms with the Lebanese authori­ties.

Not all Palestinians live in camps but even the most privileged among them endure discrimination.

At a panel on Palestinian labour rights at the American University of Beirut, Muhammad Hussein asked a Lebanese Labour Ministry official why he was denied work even in sectors that were formally open to Palestinian employment.

The 22-year-old graduate showed the official an e-mail he received from a marketing firm in Dubai re­fusing his job application on the grounds that the Lebanese office had to give priority to Lebanese workers.